1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to scheduling event streams. More particularly, it relates to a method, to apparatus and to a computer program for scheduling event streams.
2. Description of Related Art
There are different types of event streams, such as sensor data, received from sensors as data sources. Examples are stock data and data from a currency arbitrage system. The event streams could include data which indicates a series of events such as parameter data or stock values.
An event stream can have different data formats and can be transmitted in data packets or continuously in frames. Such event stream data can, for example, indicate the temperature or a pressure measured by means of sensors. This event stream data can be processed by processing units, such as a CPU.
In most systems, it is not possible to process and evaluate all received event streams immediately because of the restricted resources of the processing unit. Accordingly, it is necessary to determine at any given moment which event stream to schedule next to be processed. This scheduling of received event streams is performed by a scheduler.
Conventional schedulers use different policies to schedule received event streams. These policies may include a round-robin policy, a priority-based scheduling or the allocation of a share of the available processing time to distinct event types.